What I'm Listening To, 2025.3.17
Bad Jukebox Songs, a Samizdat Rock Album, and the Might of Hope Sandoval
For a couple of years I lived across from Mission Park in Spokane. I had a rancid little room with a tiny balcony that looked out over the street towards the park. To be clear, the room was rancid because I was a shiftless, broke grad student. My room was tiny but, for some inexplicable reason, had a working, free-standing sink in the corner. The house had been a halfway house at some point. It had 11 bedrooms and about half of them had locks on the outside of the doors.
Once or twice a month I would walk the couple of miles to 4,000 Holes, a record store on the west side of town. It was probably a 10 minute walk from there to The Viking, a bar that used to be great and is now kind of lame. My friends and I would drink pitchers of cheap beer and torment the other patrons by putting Pulp on the jukebox. In our defense, how insane is it to have entire Pulp records on a jukebox? People only actually want to hear “Common People”. If you have their entire discography available you’re going to attract dorks like my friends who put on something like “Mile End”.
We should have been bounced and never let back in.
The Viking changed hands and now it’s a middling sports bar. Rumor has it that Bob Gallagher finally sold 4,000 Holes and retired. Good for him, he did a solid civic service for years.
On one of my many delves into the bins there, I came across a CD copy of Dover’s I Was Dead for 7 Weeks in the City of Angels. It had a sticker across the disc that read PROMOTIONAL COPY; NOT FOR RESALE. I knew almost nothing of Dover at that point, but I got it almost on principle. I was glad I did, the whole album is solid rock jams and it opened up the rest of Dover’s excellent discography for me.
Like all of my CDs it got lost in a move and the rips got lost when a hard drive died.
You can’t find the album on any of the legitimate outlets in the US these days. It’s not on Spotify. There’s some poor-quality uploads on YouTube. If you’re lucky, you can find an import copy on Amazon for more than you should ever pay for a CD. That is, assuming you have anything that can play a disc these days.
I suppose it’s poor form to endorse piracy in this day and age when it feels like Capitalism won that fight via co-option, maintaining its apparently unbroken record. After all, what is Spotify but Piracy after passing through Capital’s “tungsten-carbide stomach” (to steal a phrase from Jean François Lyotard) and out the other end. But I think piracy still has its good and proper place in the world. That one can’t have ready access to one of the great rock records of the 21st century (released, coincidentally, a week after 9/11) due to the fickle whims of international media conglomerates is a crime. I’m not saying you, personally should still be torrenting your favorite music, but I’m not not saying it.
At least we do have access to any number of stunning live performances, including those from before we were of show-going age. This stripped down, minimalist version of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” guts me every time. Hope Sandoval’s vocals carry so much wistful energy that the band only has to provide enough structure to keep forward motion. Her energy alone enough to captivate the entire amphitheater.
Stage presence is a concept that I used to write about so much that I made myself sick of it, but I think this is such an interesting example of it. Most people captivate an audience via pagentry or some sort of overt passion that brings the crowd along. Sandoval’s quiet interiority does the opposite. She brings the crowd in and commands quiet attention. Brashness is ultimately easy, this is the kind of performance that takes real guts and charisma to pull off.